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Obstacles Nothing New for Georgetown Football

WASHINGTON — In his first offensive series of the season, the Georgetown Hoyas’ senior quarterback and captain, Isaiah Kempf, took off running on a third-and-9 from the team’s 25-yard line. He gained 18 yards but sustained a concussion that sidelined him indefinitely.

The junior Aaron Aiken stepped in, ran for more than 100 yards, threw two touchdown passes and led Georgetown to a 34-14 win that afternoon at Davidson. The next week, in the home opener, he helped the Hoyas defeat Wagner, 13-10.

Aiken was soon injured himself, however, and his replacement, the sophomore Stephen Skon, was also sidelined by the second week of October. Against Colgate on Oct. 20, the freshman Kyle Nolan got the start at quarterback. He threw three touchdown passes, but Georgetown lost, 57-36. That dropped the Hoyas’ record to 3-5. Since then, they have won two in a row and Skon has returned.

This season was supposed to go differently for Georgetown Coach Kevin Kelly and his team. Last year, just two seasons removed from an 0-11 record, the Hoyas vied for the Patriot League title and finished 8-3, their best record since joining the conference in 2000. Instead it has been a mix of frustration and surprise, a microcosm of the history of the program, which has combined flashes of promise with long stretches of futility.

“This year we have a lot of players that are back, but we had our starting quarterback get injured on the fifth play of the season,” Kelly said. “Then our second-team quarterback got hurt, then our third-team, and then we had a freshman play and do a nice job.”

Georgetown plays its home games at a site known simply as Multi-Sport Field, carved out of the rolling slope on the south side of campus. It is also home to the men’s and women’s lacrosse teams and is a stadium on extended delay, its funding having stalled in the middle of the last decade. It has seating, largely temporary, for just 2,500, the smallest capacity of any team’s field in either the Football Bowl or Championship Subdivisions.

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Georgetown Coach Kevin Kelly with the senior linebacker Robert McCabe, the Hoyas’ career tackles leader.Credit
Georgetown University Athletics

The unfinished state of a modern field on a campus dating to the late 18th century is reflective of the football program’s sometimes conflicted status in the athletic life of the university.

Georgetown football does not lack for its own history. The team began in 1874, and its list of opponents over the decades has included Mississippi, Michigan State, Penn State and Miami, as well as most of the teams in the Ivy League. The Hoyas have appeared in the Orange and Sun Bowls.

Those successes are but faint memories to current students and fans. What some do recall is that the football team was shut down for budget reasons in 1950, a decision still echoing in the program’s current course of fiscal thrift.

It was not until 1963 that a group of students successfully petitioned the university for a one-game return of football to campus. The contest, an exhibition, featured a Georgetown club team against Frostburg State Teachers College, and was scheduled for Nov. 23, 1963. It was canceled after President Kennedy was assassinated.

The next year, Georgetown defeated a club team from New York University, 28-6, before a crowd of over 8,000 fans at the Hoyas’ Kehoe Field.

By 1970 the team was sufficiently re-established to rejoin the N.C.A.A. at the College Division level. In 1973, the College Division was subdivided into Division II and III, and Georgetown was assigned to Division III. It remained at that level until 1993, when it joined Division I-AA, now the F.C.S., where it still plays.

In January 2011, Coach Kelly asked Bruce Simmons, a 1969 graduate and former club-level player, to lead the Gridiron Club, whose overall mission is to support the program both vocally and fiscally.

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Kyle Nolan (13), a freshman. played quarterback after three others were hurt.Credit
Georgetown University Athletics

“We realized there was almost 50 years of Georgetown players that played football for free, nonscholarship,” said Simmons, who lives in Atlanta and returns for home games to root for the Hoyas and help coordinate the Gridiron Club’s pregame tailgating. “They played because they loved it. If that experience meant as much to them as it did to me, I knew that if I just asked them to come back to be part of the family, they would respond.”

As important as the booster club’s physical presence at games is its fiscal support of the program. The annual goal for the Gridiron Club is to raise $300,000 annually for the team, or the difference between the $1.6 million the university budgets for the program, and the $1.3 million it actually provides. In the 2010-11 fiscal year, Simmons said the Gridiron Club raised $140,000. That number has jumped to $341,000 this fiscal year.

The re-establishment of on-field success and off-field support has been gradual and is still decidedly a work in progress. Andrew Rennie, a Georgetown senior and the president of the university’s official student spirit organization, remembers that, when the Hoyas went winless when he was a freshman, he saw a banner hanging from a dormitory window urging that Kelly be fired. Before last year, the Hoyas’ last winning season was 1999, when it was a member of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference for football.

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Yet Kelly, who arrived at Georgetown in 2006, may be well suited for building a winner with the resources at hand. Before leading the Hoyas, he coached linebackers at Navy, a team that often has to make up for its relative lack of size with intelligence and effort. In Kelly’s three years at Annapolis, Navy made three bowl games, winning two, and captured the Commander-in-Chief’s trophy, given to the best team of the three service academies, each season.

Through a difficult season, the anchor of this Georgetown team is the senior Robert McCabe, who leads the F.C.S. in tackles and recently became the Hoyas’ career leader in the category.

“Personally, I know the history of the Georgetown program and how storied it is and how far back it dates,” McCabe said. “Coming off of last season we want to build on that.”

The Hoyas close out their season at home against Holy Cross on Saturday. The Patriot League title is no longer a possibility — Georgetown is 2-2 in the conference — but a winning season is, and the opportunity to cement it in Washington is an added incentive.

“I told the players we can still duplicate our 3-2 record of last year and have winning seasons back-to-back,” Kelly said. “It’s been quite a while since Georgetown’s done that.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2012, on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Obstacles Nothing New for Georgetown Football. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe